Product DescriptionWhen the mysterious Jean More dies in the small plane she learned to fly just two weeks earlier, she leaves her paramour David Lum with seemingly unanswerable questions: How had she come by the scars on her body? Why was she wanted by the FBI? What was the hidden purpose of her final flight? The puzzle of Jean's past leads David overseas to Paris, where he finds Jean's long-lost daughter and discovers the horror that connects Jean to a nuclear power plant. David's own life ultimately becomes forfeit as he finds himself adopting Jean's secret mission as his own. ... Read more

Product DescriptionAn American Romance, Hans Koning’s second novel, was originally published in 1960 by Simon and Schuster. It is a story of love and marriage—and the devastating difference between the two conditions. Two attractive young people marry within three weeks of their first meeting, and their early days are spent in isolated, intense excitement. For Philip, Ann is miraculous, the woman of his dreams. But he, like many of his time and place, has not learned to live with fulfillment. Happiness to him lies in its pursuit; there is no place for Tristan and Isolde in a two-room apartment. What happens to Philip and Ann is told in a haunting novel that looks deep into the natures of men and women. Here is the dichotomy of male and female caught in the intimate transcript of one couple’s progress in and out of love. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A great love story
Koning's novel about two people who get married almost immediately after meeting and falling in love is a crushing story about how two people can live and be in love, not seeing eye to eye. It is about how unhappy lives are lived. I had never read a love story that portrayed love this honestly, but this one really succeeds. Granted, it isn't the story of all loves, but of a failed attempt at it by two people who wanted it to work.
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DeWitt's War is Everymans (& Womans) War
I read DeWitt's War about 15 years ago and I have never forgotten it.There was something about the story that was "haunting".It not only captured the mood of an occupied country during the Second World War, it also captured the mood of a man who was determined to right a great wrong, no matter the discomfort or danger.

The book never explained why Jerome Witt (the protagonist) acted in this fashion.It seemed that this was part of his character - a man of integrity who would never shirk his duty or abandon his ideals.

This book was also a great detective or suspense novel.The ending is stunning!I highly recoomend this book
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Columbus book review
Excellent book and well written, though very short. Impossible to put down once you begin reading. I recommend, however, reading other Columbus books to give yourself a more balanced view. This book is very subjective and highly opinionated. All content is anti-Columbus. The book contains many details you'll never find in other history books or public school texts in America. After reading, you'll hunger for more information.

The unsanitized version
This is a book that attempts to setthe record straight on Columbus the manand the chain of events set off by his voyage of discovery. Koning does not delight in debunking the myth, nor does he gloat in the exose'; rather the tone is one of moral despair over the actual facts. Essentially the Christian Spaniards slaughtered and enslaved as they plundered the New World. Convinced he had found the fabled way to Cathay ahead of the rival Portuguese, Columbus appears every bit the avaricious social climber of his era. Skilled and daring, he was also venal and petty. Koning's portrait is not a pretty one, but then we've had enough of those.

Koning takes the revered Samuel Eliot Morrison to task for his sanitized portrait of the Great Explorer. Most reprehensive, in Koning's view, is Morrison's utter disregard for the death and destruction left in Columbus's wake and to which he was a party. Seemingly, Morrison's brand of biographical myopia represents a particularly deadly brand of Western ideology at work, one that cleans up the official record on behalf of the powers that be.

Perhaps most praiseworthy in Koning's tratment are the succinct moral parallels he draws between the civilizing forces of Spain in the New World and their 20th century American counterparts in Vietnam, where additional tens of thousands were slaughtered resisting Western conquest. A book like this exposes unmistakably the self-serving mythology that surrounds so much of our official history. Such versions are not misleading by accident, instead they work to a purpose and there seems no better word for describing that purpose than ideological. They are distortions that preserve current institutions of power; namely, those political and economic arrangements that also happen to be products of Columbus's bloody wake. It's interesting to speculate the direction our polity would take were Koning's book, rather than the traditional sanitized versions, required reading in the nation's high schools. Be that as it may, don't expect to see Koning in a Columbus Day parade any time soon.

Columbus, finally the truth
Koning gives a very valid speculation on Columbus' life and voyages.Thoughout the years, the story of Columbus has been twisted and glamourized, making the people of America believe that he was a hero. Koning goes in to great detail when explaining the truths behind all thesemythological ideals.It is an easy read as well as a very good piece ofwriting.
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A Poignant Picture of a Slice of Chinese Life
First, if you're looking for contemporary, 2006, Chinese life, look elsewhere.

This is an over-40-years-old view, but one which -- there were a number of such books -- the author gives a snapshot of what was going on in China in 1965.It's a well-written, interesting cut on what was going on in that country then.And it's interesting to see how much of that has played out as China enters the 21st century.

The author writes with a novelist's flair.Meaning, the book is enjoyable, fascinating, and a page-turner.It needs to be back in print.
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Product DescriptionIn addition to a number of nonfiction works on such varied topics as Vermeer, the American Indian and China, the Dutch-born writer Hans Koning has published 11 well-received novels, beginning with "The Affair" in 1958 (the early books carried the byline Hans Koningsberger). His newest, the first in eight years, is "Pursuit of a Woman on the Hinge of History." Like his "Acts of Faith," which appeared in 1986, this novel could be described as a metaphysical thriller. The protagonists of both works move swiftly through challenges and disasters against constantly changing scenery, and each becomes involved with powerful conspirators who mean to change the world.

In many ways, these two anti-heroes could be seen as middle-aged versions of yet another Koning character: Gavrilo Princip in "Death of a Schoolboy" (1974), a masterly reimagining of the life of the Bosnian Serb who shot the Archduke Francis Ferdinand in 1914 and sparked the outbreak of World War I. The later characters share Gavrilo's predilection for a Bakuninesque utopian anarchism; the difference is that he died too young to have lost his simple faith in human goodness and the efficacy of individual action, while his two literary descendants are repeatedly confounded by the dispiriting complexity of things.

The "hinge of history" of the new novel's title proves to be the world's return to a matriarchal system, in which justice will prevail and wars will be unknown. The narrator's name is Lucas, but it's not clear whether this is a first or a family name; he is in his 30's or possibly his 40's, and he adopts false identities with dizzying speed, a habit that at first looks picaresque but later seems to suggest that Lucas is a kind of Everyman. He wears an unfashionable green suit, perhaps to suggest the coming revolution in human affairs: "It had that shimmer you see on the bare earth when a new crop is about to sprout."

A third-person narrator, not quite omniscient, takes over now and then to give us another perspective on Lucas's story, which at times -as Lucas himself suggests- may be hallucinatory. Yet the traditional role of the literary madman is to reveal uncomfortable truths. As he crosses a square in Paris, Lucas hears unearthly screaming; without knowing it, he is standing on the very spot where the friar Damiens was slowly tortured to death for his assault on Louis XV. When Lucas is incarcerated in a German labor camp, a vision of Nazi concentration camps superimposes itself on his present reality. At this point Lucas is said to be "imprisoned in a memory not from his own life but from the lives of others, possibly the memory of the 20th century itself which has the camp at its core."

Like John Balthasar in "Acts of Faith," Lucas sees something extraordinary in a Spanish village, a vision so important that it transforms his life. His epiphany comes in the form of a beautiful woman, later identified as Maria but associated by him with Diana of the Crossroads and other female deities. When Lucas first sees her, she is sitting in a cafe with Otto Vinograd, a wealthy art collector with an eccentric plan: he intends to save the world's artistic masterpieces from the masses by storing them in caves, with near-perfect copies left behind as substitutes in museums and private collections. Maria is in league with a Basque separatist group; together they are trying to swindle Vinograd of his billions in order to usher in the millenarian society of their dreams.

It is not clear whether all the conspirators agree on the precise nature of this longed-for Eden. The Basques (who were also important in "Acts of Faith") seem to symbolize the dawn of humanity, perhaps because their origins continue to be mysterious; at any rate they are, in these novels, a type of the dispossessed. Lucas works for the Basques and for Maria in various capacities, the most dramatic of which involves giving away large sums of money (Vinograd's) to the poor; this is the redistribution of wealth that Maria will use to "balance history."

Lucas's matriarchal revolution is not really feminist; following chivalric tradition, it dehumanizes women by making them divine. Lucas offers the highly interesting suggestion that speech is the root of all evil: "In the beginning was not the word. In the beginning was the earth, a golden age of softness, not soft weak, but soft harmonious, naked nymphs instead of armored Roman goddesses... With the word, the male world started. And under the flag of words, war, slaughter, enslaving began." Ironically, as usually happens when language is attacked, the weapon of choice turns out to be language itself.Amazon.com ReviewConspiracies, a return to a matriarchal system, a visionarynarrator, and twists in time itself are just a few of the elementsthat make up Dutch writer Hans Koning's brilliant and challengingnovel, Pursuit of a Woman on the Hinge of History. The hinge towhich the title refers is a millenarian dream of a matriarchal societyin which peace would become the norm, wealth would be equally shared,and strife would be unknown. This utopia is the goal of a group ofconspirators consisting of the narrator, Lucas, a beautiful womannamed Maria, and a group of Basque separatists--unlikely bedfellows,to be sure, and ones not necessarily in agreement on all the detailsconcerning their New World Order. Rife with symbolism, unreliablenarrators, and events that may or may not be the hallucinations of adisordered mind, Pursuit of a Woman on the Hinge of History isby turns puzzling and exhilarating, a metaphysical roller coaster forthe imagination. ... Read more

A Child of the Sixties
A stirring account of revolutionary organization and unrest in an unnamed European country.The Dutch-born author, who escaped Holland and fought with the British in World War II before moving to this country, has a very long and honorable main career as a radical journalist.

The conflict imagined in this novel is of the sort that dominated Western history from 1848 through the present.Koning is very much on the side of the revolutionaries -- who would dare to call them "terrorists?" -- but he is never blind to their weaknesses and failings.

In 1970, this novel was made into a first-rate if underappreciated film starring Oscar-winner Jon Voight as the title character.
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